Washington Post: New discoveries from NASA’s Kepler space mission made public Wednesday and published in Nature today reveal a large number of planets deep in space, with some almost as small as Earth and others in the “habitable zones” of their solar systems where scientists think life could potentially exist, writes Marc Kaufman for the Washington Post. With about 1200 candidate planets now cataloged, Kepler has also identified a solar system with at least six small planets orbiting their sun—all lined up on a disk-like plane similar to our own.